


Set List

by OxfordOctopus



Series: The Mixtape [2]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pre-Canon, Side Story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:55:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24772000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: A place for canon and non-canon omakes / side-stories from My Fake Girlfriend is a Vigilante.
Relationships: Emma Barnes & Sophia Hess | Shadow Stalker, Emma Barnes & Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver, Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver & Sophia Hess | Shadow Stalker, Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver/Sophia Hess | Shadow Stalker
Series: The Mixtape [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1791544
Comments: 2
Kudos: 44





	1. MIX-TRACK: ROMANTIC POETRY

**Author's Note:**

> Chapters labelled with 'Mix-Track' are to be considered canon.
> 
> Chapters labelled with 'Bonus-Track' are to be considered non-canon.

_January 4th, 2010_

Taylor's locker combination was 36-94-12-25. It had been for well over two years at this point, back when she'd replaced the piece of shit lock they'd given her in seventh grade. The woes of going to low-middle income schools was that everything broke and you were generally obligated to replace it, and after she'd come to school one day to find her lock haphazardly unlocked and left on the ground in front of her - thankfully very empty - locker she had decided against ever using anything the school gave for her own security again.

Winslow, as a matter of fact, had not changed this. If anything, it had tremendously enhanced that uneasy feeling that she shouldn't trust anything they'd given her with something more sensitive than a grocery list. The school was notorious for its gang affiliations, among other things, and while Taylor liked to think she fit in well enough, blended into the crowd, she still didn't want to run the risk of losing something important to her because a Merchant-to-be needed something to pawn to feed an addiction that was, at least to begin with, likely no real fault of their own. Not that she couldn't really sympathize, Brockton Bay was hardly empty of sympathetic cases of young children being exposed to drugs early on in their life, getting hooked and being forced to take part in a cyclical societal problem that might literally kill them if they tried to go clean, but at the end of the day she really would rather not have to explain to the band teacher why she had to haggle to buy her flute back from some greasy tattooed fuckhead at a pawn store.

"You're thinking too loudly," Emma complained, jolting her from her thoughts. Glancing towards her best friend, she found her propped up against one of the unused lockers around hers, looking impatient and ready to do anything else but see her fiddle with her heavy-duty lock. "It's literally the first day after winter break, what on _earth_ can be bothering you now?"

Opening her lock had turned into a science at this point, less carefully turning to reach certain numbers and more muscle memory built up from years of use. One crank to the left, slowing down so that it picked up the 36, a crank to the right, all the way back to the start, then back to the left. Popping the body of the lock from the ring, Taylor twisted the thing around without looking, sticking her tongue out at Emma. "I was having a very thorough mental dialogue about the injus—"

The paper less fell, more flooded out of her locker. Dozens upon dozens of loose pages pouring out, with enough weight behind them to shove her locker door almost out of her hand, spilling haphazardly onto the ground, pooling near her feet. Taylor stared down at the piles of letter paper, heard the entire hallway - which had, until now, been a source of a low murmur of noise, people talking, complaining, normal things - go completely silent. Gazing blankly at the pile of papers that covered her shoes, Taylor could just barely pick out a scattering of rose petals among them, like someone had ripped the head off of the flower and added them to the pile without much thought behind it. There were maybe three, maybe four, petals all told, and about a dozen or more pages of paper. She shifted her shoe, causing some of the pile to collapse off to the side, letting her blue chucks show through the mess of papers.

Emma shuddered, visibly choked on something.

"Why," Taylor started slowly, turning to glance at Emma, whose shoulders shook with palpably restrained mirth, her eyes focused on one of the pages, scanning over the contents, little snorts choking themselves out of the pit of her throat. "Is my locker full of paper."

That did it. Emma laughed, a high, cackling thing, and like dominoes it cascaded out from there, people snickering and laughing and giggling. Taylor felt heat crawl into her skin, a flush of embarrassment pressing itself out until she was almost certain that her ears, cheekbones, and everything else for that matter resembled a tomato.

"I'm not doing this," Taylor finally decided, shoving aside some of the papers which hadn't fallen out with the rest and retrieving her textbooks. Her back would hate her for it, but she was not dealing with this right now, she was going to use her backpack and be unorganized but _fuck this entire situation._

"Buh—but, wait, wait-wait-wait. Taylor, Taylor, my honey, my gal, my pal among gals," Emma's hand wrapped around her wrist, not letting her leave. Damn did that bitch have a strong grip. "Someone clearly put a lot of effort into this, you can't just leave it."

Out of the corner of her eye, Taylor saw a blonde head twitch. Oh god, was it really that guy who had been really persistent about hanging out with her? Fuck, what even was his name, Ted? Jeff? Reg? Something like that. Ugh.

"I'm not picking it up," Taylor blurted, packing the last of her textbooks away in her increasingly cramped piece-of-shit backpack.

Emma choked. "Oh, come on Taylor, look at just how..." she trailed off, biting her lip as colour crawled its way over her face, visibly swallowing down her laughter. " _Romantic_ it is, they clearly put a lot of effort into it."

The door not ten paces away opened up, Mrs. Savage - the grade nine-through-eleven social studies teacher, and a woman who more than lived up to her name - sticking her head out, glancing around the crowd of onlookers, then to the pile, then to her. Taylor felt her stomach drop. God damn it.

"Ms. Hebert," Mrs. Savage drawled, her narrow green eyes almost glinting with unearned mirth. "Clean up your messes, or you can spend the lunch hour with me grading other people's. I'll be checking."

Then the door shut.

Emma erupted into howls of laughter, prancing forward like a woodland animal to steal a few papers off the top of the pile, probably already knowing that she couldn't use it as material to tease her with if she was going to try to destroy most of it.

Taylor shut her eyes, sighed, and crouched down to begin picking up the mass of corny poetry, hoping to god the nearest bin would be big enough to hold all of it.


	2. MIX-TRACK: GLORY HOUND

_October 9th, 2003  
_ (Age: 7-and-a-half)

"I wanna marry Vicky!"

Mom gaped at her, dropping the fork in her hands to the sound of metal clattering across the wooden table. Aunt Sarah stared at Mom for a moment, wearing her 'I'm not impressed' expression that Amy had come to learn was a relatively common feature when she came over for visits with her cousins.

Vicky, best sister _ever,_ stared up at her from her bowl of cereal, wrinkling her nose. "But Ames," she started, sounding confused. "What about _boys?"_

"What about them?" she shot back over the kitchen table, ignoring the choke of laughter her words startled out of Crystal, going so far as to even pitch her voice louder. "They're _gross_ Vic, really gross. Girls are better."

Aunt Sarah cleared her throat as half of the table attempted to open their mouths and praise her for her wisdom, making everyone go quiet. "Amy," she started slowly, speaking with an unusual softness, like that one time she had scraped her knee at school and her teacher had helped her put cute floral band-aids all over it. "Can you tell me what this is about?"

Frowning, Amy tucked her chin into the fuzzy fabric of her collar, plucking idly at the hem of her sweater. "Don't like boys," she said, trying to inject confidence she didn't feel into her voice. "They're gross, Vicky's pretty and so are other girls but Vicky is _especially."_

The table went quiet for a little while, making her squirm.

"I think," Aunt Sarah began again, getting up from her seat and walking over to where she was sitting, her breakfast long-abandoned. "That we should have a talk about this sort of thing, okay?"

"Am I in trouble?" She didn't want to be.

Aunt Sarah smiled again, so gentle, before shooting quite the nastier look towards Mom. "No, dear, but I think that we should talk about our feelings somewhere you would feel comfortable."

* * *

_April 24th, 2010  
_ (Age: 15)

Amy's first impression of Emma Barnes wasn't a totally pleasant one. The girl looked, to put a word to it, _mean,_ like someone who took people down an unnecessary amount of pegs at school because her dad could buy her more expensive things than their dads could. Not, of course, that she had ever been the target of that sort of thing, for all that she had come to somewhat hate New Wave for what it had done to her childhood, she couldn't say she didn't reap the perks of being an open healer in a city full of violent neo-nazis and human traffickers. Nevertheless, from the ginger hair to the carefully, artistically applied makeup to the clothing she wore to the blank expression of muted confusion on her face, nothing about Emma made her feel all that approachable, quite the opposite, even despite the bags under her eyes that she couldn't quite hide beneath caked-on concealer.

Shooting a blank look at Victoria, all she got back was a wide, toothy grin. Uugh, fucking _blackmail_.

"Why am I here?" Emma asked, sounding blank and borderline empty. The listlessness about her made Amy's skin crawl, made her wonder what exactly was going through her head, not that she probably wanted to know.

Victoria glanced behind her, probably looking for Dean. "You're on a double-date with my sister."

"I'm on a _what_ ," Emma choked out, life returning to her voice if only to show off how completely not-into this situation she very clearly was. "No, actually, I'm really not."

Dean appeared from out the side of his car, waving once he and Victoria locked eyes. Amy swallowed down a burst of petty annoyance, mingling with the long-faded echo of possessiveness towards her sister she had managed to mostly get over during middle school, the one and only time she'd tried to date another girl. No, she didn't like Victoria dating Dean, but not for any of that, no, she didn't like Victoria dating Dean because, to be honest, Dean could be a bit of an intrusive asshole when the need came to him and regardless of whether or not he thought he was doing the right thing she would fucking _strangle_ him if he ever tried to shoulder his way into her sexuality again. Period. End of discussion. She had been very clear on that matter.

"Well, you kinda are," Victoria continued, drawing Amy mercifully back into the present. "Ames is here to avoid being embarrassed by me and you're here to hopefully get over that damn slump in your life. I get that your friend's ghosted you, Emma, but you can't wither up like this, it'll do actual harm to your future."

Emma scowled, a bright and nasty look on her face, not doing anything to alleviate those worries about her being a mean girl. " _Victoria Dallon,_ for the love of fucking god, you cannot just push two lesbian—wait, I'm sorry, are you gay?"

Amy boggled, not really expecting to be addressed, or that the conversation was going to go in this sort of direction. Victoria shot her a meaningful look, one that said ' _I am ten seconds away from telling everyone about the three years from ages 6-to-9 you spent convinced you would marry me_ ', or at least something very close to it. Grunting out a sigh, Amy glanced away and towards the cars hurtling past on the road just to their left. "Yes, I am."

"Alright, since that's covered..." Emma turned back to Victoria, who was busy making eyes at Dean in a way that, to be entirely fucking honest, Amy didn't really need to see. Gross. "Victoria Dallon, you cannot fucking stick two lesbians in a room together and expect things to work out. We're still people!"

Victoria finally glanced away from her obnoxious boyfriend, her face wrinkling into a hilariously unflattering expression. "But that's what I read in those books?"

Oh god. The books. For a good part of middle school, Victoria had taken it upon herself to 'educate herself' about the 'complicated dynamics of being gay'. In other words, she bought far too many coming of age stories about gay women and dove into the books religiously. She did, to be fair, at least get a few non-fiction novels to round out the experience, but the entire situation had led to Victoria getting some pretty wild ideas about how gay people came together as couples. It had also led to Victoria attempting to set her up with basically every girl in the school and, to be blunt, they didn't talk about those incidents for a good fucking reason, despite the fact that it inadvertently led to her learning how to handle her feelings. Not that she'd ever admit it.

Fuck, she just hoped this wasn't Romantic Matchmaking 2: Electric Boogaloo.

"She's not going to let either of us leave," Amy said, keeping her voice carefully level. She turned to look at Emma, who was staring at her with an expression that could be politely called 'harried'. "Just, cope through this awkward Olive Garden date and pretend everything's okay and she'll forget this entire thing happened."

Emma made a noise, low and frustrated. "Why are you even going along with this?"

"Blackmail."

That earned her another noise, loud and belligerent. " _Victoria fucking Dallon!"_ Emma almost-screeched in a wonderful rendition of Carol's upset voice, if you ignored the swearing anyway. "Did you really _force_ your own damn sister to go on this date _?_ "

Victoria just stared back, Dean having come to her side, looping his arm into her side. "Of course I did?"

Emma made a wordless noise of anger, somewhere between a kettle boiling and nails down a chalkboard. She had a surprisingly wide vocal range, all things considered.

* * *

_January 7th, 2011  
_ (Age: 16)

Auntie Jess' death had hit everyone hard when it happened. Carol had been awful, swinging between extremes of grief and anger, barely able to control herself. Victoria had been distraught, torn apart by it all, and Aunt Sarah had ended up living with them for a few weeks, cousins included, just to ensure everything stabilized before letting everyone get back to their own devices. Even with that, though, the wounds hadn't really healed, the reality of New Wave had been laid bare and the Empire had become a part of everyone's mutual trauma, clinging to every interaction, to every possible thing that could go wrong in the future. When Victoria had gotten her powers, she had seen Carol break down because of it, had been there to hear her freak out and panic about another repeat of Fleur.

About how she had been adopted. About _who her father was._

It had been two years since that breakdown, since Victoria got her powers, and about as long for since she had her own powers. Oh, what powers they were to boot; nothing like the rest of the family, with their hardlight and flight and power, colorful and prismatic and all the things she, somewhere deep inside of her, wanted to be like. Instead, rather than any of that, she got touch-ranged biokinesis, the ability to shape any living thing she touched, with an innate understanding of what she was doing to some degree, though the piles of books she'd read on the matter had helped tremendously. It was not a pretty power, it did not raise her any higher than she had been that night, staring at her adoptive mother as she listed out reason after reason after reason why everything was going to go wrong, why she was going to go wrong.

They weren't really on speaking terms nowadays, and how 'Mom' at some point during that discussion had become 'Carol'. Distance was easier, though unfortunately it hadn't helped her anger any.

So, to be honest, staring down Shrike, with her mangled arm and her broken expression, barely concealed behind that domino mask, looking all the world like she hadn't been the reason why she'd needed to heal Victoria twice in the last week, one of which involved her _getting shot in the fucking leg,_ well, you might be able to forgive her for not being in a particularly great mood. She knew, somewhere in the rational part of her brain, that Shrike wasn't responsible for hurting her sister, she hadn't held the gun, hadn't pulled the trigger, hadn't been the Empire Eighty-Eight fuck who thought shooting at members of New Wave who were flying by was a smart decision after what they did to Fleur, but the rest of her brain was focused on just how easy it was to offload all of that garbage, that trauma, those nights without dinner because Aunt Sarah was busy, Carol was too caught up in her own grief, Dad was depressed, and Auntie Jess was dead, right onto the girl sitting with a mangled arm and a bloodied costume on that damn stretcher.

Stepping forward, the only thing that kept her anger, her hate, off of her face, was the stranglehold she had on the clipboard in her hands. She could feel the skin pulling at her knuckles, feel the wood bite into her skin, but the pain was almost a relief.

“May I have your permission to use my powers on you?”

* * *

_January 9th, 2011  
_ (Age: 16)

"You did _what?"_

Amy cringed back, pressing further into her bed at the sheer anger in Victoria's voice, the look of disbelief and, maybe worst of all, disappointment buried away in the pits of her eyes. "I... withheld healing from Shrike."

A lot of things flickered over Victoria's face, none of which Amy could identify quick enough. "It wasn't her fault, Ames!" Victoria finally belted out, sharp and loud and all-but-yelling. She took in a breath, exhaled, her shoulders visibly untensing, drooping into an achingly tired slump. "It wasn't her fault, Ames, none of this was," she repeated, her voice barely a murmur.

Amy's chest twisted painfully, twinged in a way that only a family member can cause. In a way that, maybe outside of Aunt Sarah, the only person she _considered_ family could cause. "I know that," she choked out, hating herself for the shake in her hands, the prickle at the back of her eyes. She had just be so frustrated, so worried about if this was going to lead to someone dying again. The family couldn't take another death, least of all one from an Empire member. If Victoria had died, Carol would've gone on a rampage until either there was nobody left to hurt or they killed her. "I healed her in the end," she got out quickly, not trying to justify herself but still feeling like the comment was necessary. "I still did, I didn't just, leave her."

Victoria stared, gaunt and tired and weary. Breathing out through her nose, she turned away, glancing back out through the door-frame. "I can't talk about this right now," Victoria finally said, reaching behind her to grasp the knob to the door, the hinges creaking as she shut it behind her. "Just give me some space."

The door closed.

Amy choked, swallowed back the hurt.

* * *

_January 22nd, 2011  
_ (Age: 16)

"You will heal her without trying anything," Victoria said, staring daggers towards her as she walked beside Amy, acting as a buffer between her and the uncomfortably silent presence of Carol. "Right?"

Amy grimaced, another flush of shame riding her spine. "Yes, I won't withhold healing from Shr—Volley, I won't."

"What did you say?" A voice asked, carefully blank. Amy, along with both Victoria and Carol, stumbled to a stop, a harried woman in her early forties staring hawkishly at the three of them. She was tall, closer to six foot than she wasn't, with curly black hair pulled back into a ponytail and bright, bright green eyes that contrasted wildly with the small smattering of freckles on her face.

Carol, ever the guardian when it suited her, stepped forward. "I'm sorry, miss, but we're bus—"

"You listen to me," the woman hissed, her tone sharp and unyielding, hateful. Amy could feel Victoria's aura shudder, licking at her focus for a few seconds before it pulled back into itself. "You're going in there to heal my daughter right now, why on earth should I trust you to do it correctly this time?"

Carol frowned. "I'm sorry, but who exactly are you?"

The woman straightened her spine, towered over Carol in a way that, if how her shoulders were tensing were any indication, her adoptive mother was wonderfully unacquainted with. She might've laughed, given any other circumstance. "Annette Rose Hebert," she said smoothly, voice icy if professional. "My daughter is in there with a wedge-shaped gouge torn out of her and 3rd degree burns because a neo-nazi decided she wanted her dead for their martyr. My husband, her father, is currently talking with her handler and looking for options about what we can do if we decide to pull her out of the program, despite her probationary status. To top it all off, the only conventional healer in the city has apparently already mistreated my daughter, the healer who is about to go into her room and use her powers on her. So, again, to ask: why on earth should I trust you this time?"

The guilt was back, so was the shame. Victoria quietly held her hand for a few moments, a firm squeeze, but offered no further support, just a quiet anchor, someone who would be there for her if everything went wrong. Breathing in through her nose, then out through her mouth, Amy forced herself to own those feelings. They were hers, she had to deal with them, that was just how things worked. "You can come with me," she said after a moment, staring up at a woman who, frankly, Amy could genuinely believe to be Shrike's mother. Birds of a feather, and all that. "I also promise that I will heal her even with non-verbal confirmation, I'm... sorry, about what I did. I was upset, there's a lot of baggage around the Empire. She was just... the easiest person to offload it onto."

Annette laughed, harsh and unfriendly. "She always is," her words cut, and again Amy felt that pang of guilt, of something awful crawling into her throat. People didn't get powers from nowhere, after all, and if she had a history of this sort of thing? She wasn't going to think about it, couldn't. "But, fine. Lets do it that way."

The pressure released finally, and Amy let herself breathe. Glancing back at Victoria once last time, Amy walked forward stiltedly, down the hallway and towards the door number she'd been told about. Reaching out, she banged the back of her hand against the knob, her fingers shaking too much, before finally managing to get her fingers around it, twisting it as she pushed it open. A mirror to the last time she had healed the girl stared back at her, though this one was significantly more clean. Instead of a bloodstained costume she was in sweats, with no sign of the patch-ups they'd likely done to her side, though from the way she was breathing, the tensing of her body, she was probably in a significant amount of pain. Swallowing down her nervousness, remembering that she had to be professional, that she had to mend bridges, Amy opened her mouth.

"Taylor _Hébert_?"

And almost immediately botched it. Why the fuck had she said that name like she was speaking french? She'd just wanted to get it right. She had literally fucking heard the name not ten seconds ago what the actual goddamn fuck was wrong with her nobody in the damn room was French for fucks sake.

She was such a massive fuck-up. Fucking hell. Poof went the professionalism, and from the way Taylor stared at her like she'd bitten into a lemon, there was probably a fair amount of second-hand embarrassment being thrown around. She bet the fucking Germans had a word for that, Schnufflekrunt or something to specifically refer to this second-hand embarrassment coming full circle and kicking her in the goddamn stomach.

After another long few seconds, Taylor blinked at her again. "Yes," she rasped, and Amy took that as a good enough excuse as any to move on and away from her fuck-ups.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have a random bit of world building stuff that came to me like a vision. Before you ask, the reason why I'm changing Amy in this way - in that in this AU she admitted her feelings about Victoria and had someone to talk to about her feelings in general which never led to them being bottled up and twisted as they had been in canon - is because, despite the fact that this fic is relatively dark in tone, I don't really want a predatory incestuous lesbian stereotype in this fic? Like, that's who Amy is, unfortunately, because for all that Worm is a great piece of fiction its gay characters really leave something to be desired and frankly it is just, literally easier to write out that part of her character while retaining her unhealthy dependency on Victoria without it being turned into a sexual assault thing.
> 
> Anyway, next update is still on Monday. Look forward to that.


End file.
